Embrace of the Serpent: "the first Colombian film told from the perspective of an indigenous protagonist and the first film to shoot in the Colombian Amazon in three decades."
As readers know from my novel Flight of the Goose, the Old Ways and the new ways clash most of the time and have most often led to tragic loss and great injustices with the losers always the indigenous and colonized...the winners the scientists/explorers with their trophies and publications and getting to pave the way into the forest or tundra for the resource developers (don't get me started with the subject of missionaries).
Rarely were there historic meetings in which the scientist/anthropologist was respectful - currently "Western" scientists at least pay lip service and sometimes tolerance or outright obeisance to indigenous ways of knowledge and spirituality.
I've not yet seen Oscar-nominated film from Colombia, "Embrace of the Serpent" but it looks fantastic and one that fans of Flight of the Goose, Linda Hogan's Mean Spirit, At Play in the Fields of the Lord, The Ten Canoes, Atarnajuat, White Dawn, The Revenant, The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures, Jon Turk's The Gift of the Raven, Elizabeth Marshall Thomas's works" might like. The film is a fictional drama of the latter kind of meeting of minds in which the the indigenous shaman and the scientist try to understand and learn from one another and the Old Ways come out looking the wiser.
According to the interview of director Ciro Guerra, the indigenous characters are played by “real indigenous people, and white characters played by actors. “We have a contrast between people coming from different worlds altogether,” he said, and this seems to fit the surroundings. The Amazon is a multicultural region featuring numerous cultures, languages and histories. For example, the region where Embrace of the Serpent was filmed includes 70 different languages.
"Kaiamakate (the shaman) shares many of his beliefs and cultural practices...The explorers respect his beliefs, but they don’t seem to practice them. They have difficulty overcoming their scientific minds and following in the footsteps of their guide. This back and forth between cultures and beliefs is one of the hallmarks of Embrace of the Serpent, known as El Abrazo de la Serpent."
The NYT review is a good one too, link is above.
An update on the Amazon tribes in the Guardian (excerpt)
DH: You say “humanitarian catastrophe.” Can you elaborate?
FM: I mean the genocides, ethnocides, epistemicides, slavery, forced displacement of social groups, dispossession and the disruption of social systems. This is happening today in different parts of Brazil. From 2003 to 2014 there were 390 Indians killed in Mato Grosso do Sul, mostly Kaiowa Guarani, fundamentally in conflict with ranchers and soya plantations. The Guarani consider this genocide. And to combat falling commodity prices, the government now wants to increase extraction of natural resources such as iron ore and weaken indigenous rights and the rights of nature. The Belo Monte mega-dam alone affects 12 indigenous lands and 21 maroon communities. I’ve seen the recently-contacted Arara coming to Altamira, treated by the consortium building the dam as beggars. One Arara community has been completely dysfunctional for the past 4 years: their land has been invaded, with increasingly high levels of deforestation and illegal logging associated with the pressure of building the mega-dam.
DH: And “ecological holocaust”?
FM: I mean the destruction of environments: almost 20% of Brazil’s Amazon and 45% of the Cerrado - the savannah - are deforested, while the main tributaries of the Amazon from the eastern border of Peru and the Andes have around 150 proposed dams, and from the southern banks of the R. Amazon big rivers such as the Tocantins, Xingu, Madeira, Teles Pires and now the Tapajos have been or are being dammed. Last year there were 40,000 fires in indigenous lands in just one state, Maranhão, while the Xingu Park, surrounded by soya plantations, is burning every year. For the first time in their history, the Kuikuro have witnessed a typhoon on their land.
DH: You’ve touched on some of the major “drivers” of these horrors: logging, ranching, charcoal, iron ore, soya and mega-dams. Any others? Who are some of the most feared operators and who’s financing a lot of it?
FM: Capital expansion is certainly the main driver, but it doesn’t work alone. Local histories of violence, state lack of responsibility to the poor, elite privileges and racism are other ingredients. Recent developmentalism has been pushed by the Brazilian Development Bank (BNDES) playing the role that the World Bank did during the dictatorship, financing huge slaughterhouses and mega-dams. In the most violent region, southern Pará, where Zé Cláudio and Maria were killed, the main driver of blood today is the expansion of iron ore mining by Vale, the S11D project, and its infrastructure, such as the expansion of the Carajás railway.
